Carlos Runcie Tanaka: The Pleasures of Simultaneity by Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Initial approaches to the sculptures and installations of Carlos Runcie Tanaka, a Peruvian artist of British and Japanese descent who lives and works in Lima, disclose an aesthetic mission based on intuiting ideas through a complex theater of abstract and referential images in which light and color play a significant role. The more subtle the stagecraft, the more enveloping and provocative the theme—relationships between symbolic language and nature, inner ripplings of internal time consciousness, ambiguities that emerge when apprehending a ritual while enacting it—the more the works clarify into a central, abiding preoccupation: how approaching the infinite within the context of visual art entails the coalescing of two or more systems of representation and reflection. This layering of expressive systems is what awakens the reverberative nature of aesthetic experience targeted on a philosophical idea, and the same layering occurs in our participation in and theatrical experience of ritual.